Creating a plan to become a User Experience Designer at Airbnb

I am an Executive Assistant at Airbnb and I have decided I want to move into a User Experience Designer role in the next 18 months. It is going to be very hard to make this change.

Why do I want to make such a difficult transition? Because I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up. It took 10 years to figure out what I like doing but i’m probably going to have a job for the next 50 years so I might as well make the leap now.

Figuring out what you want to do- what you enjoy doing- is the most difficult and important step. So now that I have that out the way I created this plan mapping out the skills and experience I need to gain over the next 18 months. The plan is useful because it forces me to get very specific about what I need to do each week.

What your looking at is basically a spreadsheet listing the skills a junior UX designer has. I got this information from various job descriptions and our design levels framework. Its important to get super specific about what you will do, when and what success looks like.

I have a reminder each week to update the progress column listing out what I have worked on that week. This is a simple way for me to know if I am on track or falling behind.